One promising new strategy is to use access to open, natural space as an amenity to serve as an economic engine, drawing residents, dollars and business.  This potential only exists if we engage our rural communities in environmental restoration efforts.

The 2008 farm bill contains a provision, the Cooperative Conservation Partnerships Initiative, which if given the opportunity can work to provide landowners and communities the incentives to work in area wide partnership to support environmental restoration, providing the means to join conservation and rural community development efforts.

The potential is great. The rural communities in the nation’s mid-section that have consistently grown in recent decades are largely those with environmental amenities – primarily lakes and mountains. But in the future, access to uncrowded, restored natural space will become as valuable and important as lakes and mountains.

Communities that provide access to restored, natural space are more attractive places to live, work or start a business. Imagine living in a rural Nebraska community where just minutes outside your back door is a walking, hiking and bike trail running through a restored native prairie or wetland, where you can find multiple species of birds, fish and wildlife.

Those amenities could be marketed by a community to draw in families to buy homes, populate schools and start businesses. They will create the potential for tourism related businesses by providing opportunities for hunting, horseback riding, and wildlife viewing for example. And when we combine that with support for small-scale entrepreneurship, it fosters the creation of quality jobs through self-employment.

Community support is important for environmental restoration efforts to reach their full potential. When communities see environmental restoration as a force for positive change in their communities, they can embrace it as an opportunity rather than see it as a threat. It gives them a stake in the process.  

Through the Cooperative Conservation Partnerships Initiative, which is administered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service, State Conservationists will have the opportunity to seek out projects that combine environmental restoration and rural development objectives. Under such direction, rural communities across Nebraska and the country could work collaboratively with their regional Resource Conservation and Development councils to put together a proposal that would integrate environmental restoration and rural community development as compatible goals. The proposal could pull together multiple partners for a project, such as wildlife, rural development, tourism and farm-based organizations and agencies.

Through such a project the partners could agree to work together with local farmers and ranchers to restore a native prairie (such as mentioned above) to increase wildlife habitat and water quality, provide public access and create plenty of opportunities for community members and others to enjoy the great outdoors.

The concept behind the Cooperative Conservation Partnership Initiative is to allow for much needed flexibility in how federal conservation programs are used to better fit unique, local circumstances in addressing environmental restoration. It is designed to support those efforts where folks want to work together to have a broader impact, taking conservation above and beyond settling for individual conservation practices on individual farms or ranches.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service released the Request for Proposals on Tuesday, March 11th. Let's make the most of this opportunity by encouraging our Natural Resource Conservation Service to seek out projects that combine environmental restoration and rural development objectives simultaneously.